Bestselling Cornwall-based novelist Patrick Gale will visit CAST in Helston next week to read from his latest novel Take Nothing With You.

The event on Friday, April 26 will be introduced by Colin Midson, creative director of the Port Eliot Festival, as part of CAST's occasional series of literary events ‘Word Nights’ and will be followed by a question and answer session.

Take Nothing With You begins with a hero in crisis. Eustace, aged 50 and HIV-positive, has cancer and is on the brink of falling in love. His only close friend is Naomi, a brilliant cellist who has given up performing.

Eustace was once a cellist too and music was his escape from a peculiar childhood — he grew up in an old people’s home in Weston-super-Mare. He returns to the past to tell the whole story.

Patrick Gale is the author of 16 novels including the Costa Award shortlisted A Place Called Winter and Richard and Judy bestsellers, Notes From An Exhibition and A Perfectly Good Man. His two-part BBC drama, Man in an Orange Suit, won the International Emmy for best mini-series in November 2018.

Born in 1962 on the Isle of Wight, Patrick Gale moved to Cornwall when he was 25. He now lives on a farm near Land’s End with his husband, Aidan Hicks, where they raise beef cattle and grow barley.

Patrick is chair of the North Cornwall Book Festival, patron of Penzance LitFest and a director of both Endelienta and the Charles Causley Trust.

CAST Word Nights are free, with no ticket needed, and the reading begins at 7pm. CAST Café will offer a £7.50 supper before the event from 6pm.